AS A child, all headaches were submitted to the magic of Whizz and Phensic aspirins. No one bothered to question the bad habit of not drinking water, and opting for aerated drinks or juice when thirsty, and that dehydration (absence of water in the body) could also lead to severe headaches and worse. We, however, did still conform to bush medicine and tea, though that was looked down upon, in that you just couldn’t afford MILO and OVALTINE. Yes, we were really messed up back then.

With the popularity of Antibiotics, those 250 and 500 strong tablets that were taken for almost everything, but especially if a specific STD was suspected, in the 70s and 80s these over the counter tablets had become a style, because, in Guyana, no one actually admitted that they didn’t know, so misinformation travelled fast and was convincing, and at times, it killed. I remember asking for a youngster who hung around a friend I shopped at on Bourda Green in my bachelor days. I was told the sad story of how he died. This youngster developed Hepatitis and his eyes and hands had become yellow. Instead of being advised to visit the hospital, he was told to drink strong bitters; the bitters, in this case, killed him.
The fact is, nothing about pharmaceuticals was taught in schools backed then, and so we wallowed and died in ignorance. I can remember my mother talking about a drug that deformed babies. It sounded more like something from a horror movie. As a matter of fact, she advised her children to use papaws, avocado pears and soups for the girls during pregnancy, and for the wives and ladies of the brothers, who could remember.
The only item drug-wise was something by Dr Morse that was supposed to bring us into the world with healthy skin. Today I’m not sure if it was Dr Morse or genetics and the fruits that worked for us in that area. But I was curious in a doubting way about this monster tablet she kept warning us about. I sadly discovered that it exists or existed some years later. This tablet was produced by a German company named Chemie Grunenthal in the 50s and 60s and had inflicted horrible deformities to over 10,000 children accounted while affecting over 100,000 pregnant mothers with miscarriages worldwide. The babies were born without legs or arms, or with foreshortened limbs, others deaf or blind, some with curved spines, others with heart and brain damage.

The name of the drug is ‘Thalidomide’ and it was marketed then as safe for pregnant and nursing mothers. It was advanced as a nontoxic antidote to morning sickness and sleeplessness. This company became rich, super-rich on the misery of unsuspecting consumers.

In 2012, I bought a Newsweek magazine that covered this story in a more in-depth way. The architects of this macabre chemical horror had groomed their skills with human experiments in the Nazi concentration camps during WWII; these were notorious characters that worked with Hitler’s SS. That bizarre world of evil whose functionaries were allowed to escape the Nuremberg trials had found support among some American industries like Standard Oil and the Du Pont group. Though Jewish the Du Ponts were sympathetic to Hitler and in 1926, Irenee Du Pont the most powerful member of the clan, advocated the creation of a race of supermen, by injecting special drugs into them. He was addressing the American Chemical Society when he made that speech. Thalidomide is currently packaged as a Cancer correction drug, I’m unsure that we have the monitoring system in place that has catalogued the offender pharmaceuticals, to be able to decipher what is entering our borders, legal and illegally.

Anabolic Steroids is the athletes’ Genie and had begun in Germany in the 1930s by the chemist Adolf Butenandt. He and another German chemist Leopold Ruzicka won the Nobel prize for Chemistry in 1939 for Steroids. By that time, the first injections of testosterone were already injected into humans. This illustrates that official approval and applaud one day may prove detrimental down the road.

I remember a friend in bodybuilding who used steroids and experienced deep-seated abscesses in his groin and lower back. He was looked after at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation before he migrated, swearing never again. The best medicine should be how we eat, but with how food is grown today unless we grow it, who knows? Because we’re a country without a serious well equipped medical watchdog component in agriculture and imports and even for the worksite, so the dangers to what we consume and how we live and work are coming from every direction.

When the international bodybuilder, our own Laura Creavalle, Ms Olympia 1994, was here in 2016 at the Cultural Centre, a young man got up and asked a question in line with what she had mentioned about her genetics contributing to her success. He inquired earnestly “If you don’t have the genetics, then what supplements can you use to develop mass?” Her response did not come instantly, nor could this professional provide the answer this young man was expecting. Had he asked the question in many gyms in Guyana today, he would have gotten an enthusiastic answer and an eager proposal.